North Shore Tavern Mound Visit: Perez’s cutter the key to a potential comeback
If there has been a common theme in the Pirates’ additions this winter, it’s that they are probably in a pretty good spot if they can replicate their 2022 results.
Marco Gonzales was hurt and struggled for much of 2023, but in 2022 he tossed 183 innings with a 4.13 ERA. The rotation could certainly use someone like that. Rowdy Tellez tried to play through a forearm and finger injury and didn’t come close to his 35-homer 2022 campaign.
And for Martín Pérez, it’s the difference between an All-Star campaign and being booted out of a rotation.
Pérez and the Pirates are in agreement on a one-year, $8 million contract for 2024, pending a physical,
lengthening out a rotation that desperately needs innings, in both quality and quantity. He provided both in 2022 for the Rangers, going 12-8 with a 2.89 ERA over 32 starts and 196 1/3 innings, earning him his first All-Star nod. While he had been a reliable inning eater for most of his career, that was the first time his ERA+ had been better than 100 since 2016. It was fair to wonder if it was an outlier year.
The Rangers were able to retain Pérez whenever he accepted his qualifying offer for the next season, but the results got much worse. His ERA inflated to 4.45, his FIP to 4.99 and he was booted out of the rotation for the final two months of the season. That bullpen experiment went reasonably well, so it could be a fallback in case Pérez doesn’t regain his 2022 form, but the Pirates need a starter, not a reliever.
And when you look at those two seasons, the biggest difference is the effectiveness of the cutter.
Pérez leaned heavily on his two fastballs and a changeup early on in his career, often throwing his curveball and slider roughly 10% of the time each. That changed in 2019, when those breaking pitches took a backseat in favor of a new cutter. At its best, it is one of the best cutters in the game. At its worst, it gets hit hard and doesn’t miss many bats. What’s interesting is it is a real Jekyll and Hyde year by year. Here are his slugging percentages against the cutter each year, as well as the expected slugging percentages, which is based on batted ball, walk and strikeout data:
There were 84 pitchers who had at least 50 plate appearances end with a cutter in 2022, and Pérez had the 10th-lowest slugging percentage. In 2023, 106 pitchers hit that mile marker, and Pérez’s slugging percentage allowed was the fifth-worst. Hitters went from a .228 batting average against it in 2022 to a .342 average in 2023. Going by Baseball Savant’s run value, his cutter was worth 13 runs more than league average in 2022 and 13 runs less than average in 2023.
